Abstract
Globally, environmental disasters impact billions of people and cost trillions of dollars in damage, and their impacts are often felt most acutely by minority and poor communities. Wildfires in the U.S. have similarly outsized impacts on vulnerable communities, though the ethnic and geographic distribution of those communities may be different than for other hazards. Here, we develop a social-ecological approach for characterizing fire vulnerability and apply it to >70,000 census tracts across the United States. Our approach incorporates both the wildfire potential of a landscape and socioeconomic attributes of overlying communities. We find that over 29 million Americans live with significant potential for extreme wildfires, a majority of whom are white and socioeconomically secure. Within this segment, however, are 12 million socially vulnerable Americans for whom a wildfire event could be devastating. Additionally, wildfire vulnerability is spread unequally across race and ethnicity, with census tracts that were majority Black, Hispanic or Native American experiencing ca. 50% greater vulnerability to wildfire compared to other census tracts. Embracing a social-ecological perspective of fire-prone landscapes allows for the identification of areas that are poorly equipped to respond to wildfires.
Highlights
People living in low-income countries and poor people living in affluent countries tend to suffer disproportionately from environmental disasters
29 million Americans live in census tracts with a moderate to very high potential for high-intensity wildfires
An emphasis on only the fringes of fire hazard neglects the 12.4 million people living in census tracts with poor adaptive capacity and lower, but still significant, potential for wildfires
Summary
People living in low-income countries and poor people living in affluent countries tend to suffer disproportionately from environmental disasters. The last two decades saw over 7,000 major environmental disasters that caused trillions of dollars in damage and killed more than 1.35 million people worldwide [1] In this same time period, more than three times the number of people died per disaster in low-income countries than in high-income countries [1]. When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, the impacts to life and property were disproportionately borne by the African American community–damaged areas comprised 46% Black people versus 26% in undamaged areas, [2] and 84% of missing people were Black in a city that is only 68% Black [3].
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